(August 12, 2025 at 8:31 pm)Belacqua Wrote:(August 12, 2025 at 7:32 pm)GrandizerII Wrote: It's not unusual in Hebrew for certain words to take on plural form while still taking a singular verb/adjective (and in fact, in Genesis 1, it's not just the word Elohim that has this characteristic). But still, it's very grammatically unusual to associate with a plural pronoun rather than a singular pronoun, and elsewhere Elohim is associated with singular pronouns multiple times.
The divine/heavenly court explanation makes more sense because it doesn't rely on having what is unusual grammar be normalized in just one specific case and because we see throughout Genesis and elsewhere in the OT God associated with other heavenly beings. In the early chapters of Job, God clearly has a divine/heavenly council that he interacts with, so a plurality of divine/heavenly beings was not unusual in ancient Hebrew belief, at least not early on.
I hadn't heard that about the pronouns -- that's good to know.
Given the differences in grammar, the patchwork nature of how Genesis got written, and the early hints of henotheism, it must be an endless fascination for the scholars.
Yeah, pretty much every book in the Old Testament is a patchwork of multiple texts. As you read through Job for example, it becomes clear that the prose parts and the poetry parts are from different sources (with the prose parts probably added later on to provide a backstory and closure to the poetry parts). As someone who has been digging deep into this stuff lately as a hobby, it is a lot of interesting stuff to explore, especially given the interesting stuff scholars have to say.
ChatGPT is also something I have used as an exploratory guide of sorts, though primarily to keep me engaged in what is otherwise boring text to me (like many of the Psalms - especially the Davidic ones - and the disjointed/repetitive Solomonic/Hezekiah collections of sayings in Proverbs).
